Titan disbands following funding collapse

As of January 13, competitive gaming group Titan is dead. Founder and CEO Damien Grust announced the disbandment on Titan's website, releasing all players and staff on its roster, which included Smite and CS:GO teams.

The group previously placed in the top 10 at The International 4, won in Quake at two DreamHacks and a QuakeCon, claimed a CS:GO Title at the DreamHack Invitational 2 and placed second in the 2015 Smite World Championships. However, as Grust details in his farewell post, the VAC ban dealt to CS:GO team member Hovik 'KQLY' Tovmassian in November 2014 would mark the beginning of the end.

"All the bad press that this brought and the major hit the image of an otherwise respectable brand took was too much," Grust writes. "Sponsors and partners with whom we were about to sign understandably backed out of deals, not wanting to be associated with a company that had just been tarnished. Needless to say, our budget for 2015 had gone up in smoke from one day to another."

It was a financial hit from which Titan has been unable to recover—a catastrophically high price for one member's cheating.